Those foot racers are fanatics (Oct. 19)

DIARY

I have finally cleaned my office

            by Robert LaFrance

            Some expressions are beyond the pale, as it were, but some are right on the mark.

 Try driving sometime when my friend Flug is behind the wheel. “He (or she) is driving me crazy!” I have heard people say, but last week, because of a foot injury, I had to ask Flug to drive me to the grocery store. Next time, I take a taxi, or even a limousine service, even though the nearest one is 132 kilometres away.

            I didn’t mind Flug’s backing out of his driveway without looking behind – I assumed he had a backup camera – but going through stop signs without slowing down rather unnerved me. Especially when there was a dog (Greyhound bus) coming at speed. We survived though.

            It was only later that I realized that his 1989 Gremlin didn’t have a backup camera unless someone had duct taped it to the rear bumper.

            It was a harrowing trip, but we returned in one piece, or rather three pieces, but that was what we had started with – Flug, me and the Gremlin. Groceries aren’t worth it. I resolved to dust off my hitch-hiking thumb if the need arose again.

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            Some of the news stories I am asked to cover for the Victoria Star turn out to be rather brutal. The Dam Run (http://www.runnb.ca/) that took place Saturday, Oct. 8 in Perth-Andover, was one such event.

            There I was, lemonade belly hanging out over my belt, and looking at this gaggle of athletes, real athletes who surely would race Flug’s Gremlin from Perth-Andover to Plaster Rock to Grand Falls to St. Leonard. One guy said he had run 150 kilometres since Wednesday and looked as if a cheetah would fall back in embarrassment if they were competing in a 1000 kilometre foot race.

            A woman from the Jemseg area took off running an hour before the actual 10k race and came back half an hour later, saying she had run to St. Andre just to warm up for the Dam Run. As I was getting ready to take photos of the 10k race, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the River Valley Civic Centre’s front window. Then I looked at all those finely tuned athletes champing at the bit and decided to lose some weight. Tomorrow without fail I will cut down to six bottles of lemonade a day.

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            Lately there’s been a lot of talk about Facebook. Indeed, if there weren’t, the company running that shebang had better fold up its tents and head for Minto. Facebook is nothing but conversation.

            Yesterday evening I happened to be perusing a few Facebook posts when I saw one from my Aunt Tillie. She’s 98, and got her first computer two years ago.

            And what a brute it is! I mean the computer, not Aunt Tillie. (I’m still in hopes of a hefty inheritance. She bought 1000 shares of Microsoft in 1991 and is now worth somewhat in the vicinity of the gross national product of Algeria.) She told her computer consultant, Harry, who sells used cars, to get her one that “won’t go wimpy on me when I’m trying to get on the %$#@*&$% Interweb”.

            Harry did that all right. The CEO of IBM was by last week to take a look at it. Apparently it has a zillion gigabytes of RAM – random access memory to you non-nerds – and a hard drive that a Sherpa would have a hard time lugging around. The keyboard, made personally by Bill and Melinda Gates for Stephen Hawking who found it too high-tech, is one that runs by speech recognition. If Aunt Tillie is in the garden and feels like insulting Donald Trump (not possible, but she tries) she just says it out loud and the Donald feels a pin sticking into his comb-over.

            Back to Facebook, Aunt Tillie said this morning on FB that she felt a little “unsettled” by all this talk about New Brunswick’s having an aging population and got a lot of responses, one from the prime minister. “Sunny days, Aunt Tillie,” he wrote. “Just because of your concerns, I have set aside an extra $5 billion (with a ‘b’) for your province’s health care system. Anything else you need?”

                                    *************************

            This morning, first thing, my wife poked her head (as the phrase goes) into my office and pronounced it “the messiest room in the western hemisphere”.

            Of course I was chagrined and nonplussed but, peering between boxes and files, I couldn’t help but agree. I resolved to smarten up and although that resolution didn’t go very far generally, I did decide to clean up this miasma.

            “You can do it, Bob,” said She Who Must Be Obeyed. “After all, London, England cleaned up their air pollution and the sewer that was the Thames River in the 1950s, and Stickney, just below Florenceville, used to be the smokiest place east of Flin Flon, Manitoba and Trail, BC. You can do it,” she repeated.

            And so I did. I am looking at you now from my desk, which is visible from several metres away.  

Building a better fridge (Oct. 12 column)

DIARY

The secret of canoeing and kayaking

            by Robert LaFrance

            I do a lot of thinking, always with the hope that I will come up with a plan that works. The good results of doing all this pondering range from ‘seldom’ to ‘rare’ to possibly ‘go on home’ but I keep trying anyway.

            One thought I had recently was: “Why can’t I design a better fridge than the ones most of us have already?” Surely I can do better than that, I told myself. When I look for jelly, it is ALWAYS at the back of the shelf because I haven’t eaten jelly for two days. When I (and you, don’t deny it!) put something in the fridge, it goes to the front and so on.

            The milk is on the top shelf, left hand side, and it’s the only food item that can be easily seen in that miasma I call our old Maytag. At any given time the top shelf could hold applesauce, leftovers, car parts or non-food items such as my Aunt Maudy’s oatmeal cookies.

            Here’s my idea: Insulting as the phrase is to my Aunt Susie, I suggest that an entire fridge could be a Lazy Susan, with circular shelves one could just spin to find the celery or…oatmeal cookies if one were inclined that way.

            Of course the fridge itself would have to be cylindrical, otherwise there would be a lot of wasted space. Then of course there would be wasted space around the fridge, so…

            Forget it. It’s too complicated. Now, where is that maple syrup?

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            To paraphrase the late George Carlin, when a columnist finds himself talking about bodily functions, there are some subjects he’s missed, but I’m going to do it anyway.

            I am often impressed by the number, the large number, of euphemisms for things we must do every day. So-and-so has to be excused so he can go and do “number one” and heaven forfend (as the old phrase goes) if he misjudges and it turns out to be “number two” before he gets there. My late Aunt Ella used to say: “I have to go see a man about a horse”. Up in Tilley, if one had ‘the runs’ we called it “the nine flying axe-handles”. No idea where that came from.

That’s enough of that.

            ****************************

            My apple orchard is producing many thousands of Novamacs, Libertys and Nova Easy Grows and the bears are happy.

            This might have a bit to do with an item I wrote previously, but I find the bears are getting a little too enthusiastic with their No. 2 production. I have to walk very gingerly around the trees because the bears leave their ‘sign’ (as father used to say) all over the place. “Two big men couldn’t shake hands over that pile,” Flug said as we walked (gingerly) through the orchard where my neighbour Rick had just cleared a big area with his ‘bush hog’.

            He went on to say that his nephew Calvin in western Saskatchewan had phoned him the night before. Calvin’s area of that province had just had an earthquake that measured 6.1 on the Richter Scale and Calvin was happy, Flug said.

            “Yeah, you know how lazy Calvin is, don’t you?” I said I did (lazier than a cut cat) but what does that have to do with Calvin’s orchard?

            “The earthquake shook almost every apple off Calvin’s trees,” Flug explained. “Now he doesn’t have to hire apple pickers.”

                                    *************************

            More thoughts and observations, some of them even useful:

            A warning to those whose lawns are on hilly ground and who, at the age of 68, buy a riding lawn mower for the first time – only mow UP AND DOWN, not across the hill. I wasn’t killed, but should have been. Those seats are slippery.

            I keep hearing that a certain YouTube video has ‘gone viral’. What does that mean? Along the same line, people say a certain Twitter subject is ‘trending’. It seems to me that the definitions of these words are exactly what the speaker wants them to mean, nothing more nor less. Reminds me of the George Orwell novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and Big Brother, who invented his language called Newspeak.

            I’m adding two more thoughts to the Rules of Life Dictionary I am working on. (1) Raspberries are at their very best tasting when they are so ripe that two thirds of them fall off the bush before you can pick them, and (2) If you are alone in the house and sit on the flush, the phone will ring. (I can’t seem to stay out of the bathroom today.)

            There is one huge drawback about canoeing or kayaking and the world’s scientists have yet to come up with a solution. When you kayak downriver, you have to somehow get your craft back up to where you started. My solution? Start well upriver from where you want to START, ride down to your starting point, and go home from there. See, the people who say I’m stupid are very wrong indeed.

                                                       -end-

Yellow letters on a sign - wrong! (Oct 5)

DIARY

The ‘ancient right’ to drive

            by Robert LaFrance

            Every year at this time I observe an anniversary and send a sympathy card to the residents of Alert, Nunavut. I know you’re sick and tired of my talking about it, but I’m old, so indulge me please.

When I lived up there in 1974-5 for 54 consecutive weeks it was in Northwest Territories. Somewhere along the line the government moved that armed forces base and weather station into Nunavut. They must have floated it down the Davis Strait.

The anniversary to which I refer occurs every year on October 9^th or thereabouts, not to be too accurate. The sun goes down for the winter and is not seen again until March 4 – or thereabouts.

On October 9, 1974, after I had been stationed at Alert for five months, all of us weather guys (there were no women stationed at Alert in those days) poured glasses of champagne, otherwise known as Labbatt’s Blue beer, and went outside to pay tribute to that departing sun, as it rose and set in about ten minutes, just the top edge, and we went back inside to watch reruns of the detective show ‘Cannon’. The weather service used to send videotapes of these and other action shows (Mannix, Baretta, etc.) to us. They arrived every Thursday morning in an armed forces C-130 Hercules.

So there we were, sitting in the lounge and thinking about the next five months without the sun. Looking at each other, I’m sure we were all thinking: “This crowd is no replacement for the sun.”

We made it though, but some of us had to cheat to do it. In January, when it was in the –45ºF range outside all day (I mean night) the armed forces C-130s began their fuel run from Thule, Greenland, and for a week the Hercules flew back and forth bringing in fuel oil for us and the army base. Midway through that week I asked one of the pilots if I could tag along on one run and he said sure.

The next afternoon I was in the big turboprop plane and surrounded by black rubber bladders that would be filled with oil in Greenland. “Brace yourself for this, Bob,” the co-pilot said, just before takeoff. In a few minutes we were airborne and pointed toward the north pole, 450 nautical miles away, but of course we would turn back south soon. When we got up a few thousand feet there it was, the best treat of the winter.

Here comes the sun. Hello, old friend.

                                    ****************************

            Staying with the colour yellow and now back in Victoria County, NB, yesterday I was driving along uptown and when I saw a sign at the end of a street. At the top it said “Yard Sale” in fairly large black letters. Underneath those words was…nothing.

            As I got closer, I could see that there had been some kind of attempt to relay information to the drivers going by, but it was a stretch. As I got closer I saw that the letters were yellow and therefore unreadable. Why do people put yellow lettering on a sign they want other people to read? I may be wrong, but if I were putting out a sign like that, I would almost certainly step back fifty feet, a hundred feet, or even more to see if the message was getting out. Yellow’s okay for the sun but not for signs.

            On the subject of Ireland, I know someone, a resident of the very house in which I live, who just got back from a week and a half from Dublin and points east, west, south and north. She took some photos.

            When I say she took some photos, I mean SHE TOOK SOME PHOTOS with her digital camera. A total of 292. Of course it’s my job as a professional photographer to edit and crop these photos – try to make sense of the ones that make no sense. Most are good photos (I have to live here after all) but a few of them border on the bizarre. I thought Mackenzie King and W. B. Yeats were dead, but there they are, reflected on the window of a Tim Hortons in Donegal, Ireland.

                                    *************************

            Reading a book entitled ‘English History 1914-1945’ I was interested to find out, on page 302, that that in 1920 there were 200,000 motor vehicles registered in that country and that driving tests weren’t compulsory until 1934. Even so, people who had been driving for a long time did so under what was called an ‘ancient right’ and didn’t have to take a test.

            It all reminded me of a story my late Aunt Ella told me in the 1980s. She was standing near Jimmy Stewart’s furniture story in Perth where a police officer, who had been following an old lady, stopped and asked for her driver’s licence. She replied: “Young man, I’ve been driving since 1928 and never heard of such a thing!”
                                                -end-

The Perfessor wet his pants (Sept 28)

DIARY

A major problem, all red and white

            by Robert LaFrance

            In my travels over the past months and years, I have come across things that have no explanation, like the sale of Canadian flags.

            I usually buy one or two a year because the wind up here on this mountain tends to rip them apart and the sun seems to enjoy fading them, so last week I found myself in a small store in Grand Falls.

            “We sent them all back early this month,” the clerk said, without any explanation. “People keep asking for them, but we don’t have them in the store after the middle of September.”

            Let’s go back and talk about the word ‘merchandizing’ or even ‘selling’. I always thought that those who have businesses should “give the people what they want” so if “people keep asking for them” wouldn’t it make sense to get some in?

            Long story short(er), two days later I found myself in a dollar store in Florenceville where there were a couple of dozen Canadian flags of various sizes. Apparently that store knew about merchandizing.

            Another thing that baffles me: why do people leave their vehicles running when they stop somewhere for five or ten minutes? I understand about air conditioners in the summer and I understand about big diesel trucks and the reasons those vehicles are left running, but what about Claude in his pickup with the “Drink Hardy” decals on the side? Does he think it will seize up if he turns it off?

            People are STILL being picky about the calendar date when the 21^st century started and some people are still mentioning the well-known fact that each of us has only one birthday. Technically of course, our new century started Jan. 1, 2001 but it would have been like getting Christmas presents in February if we had waited that extra year. And should we all say to our cousin Phillip: “Happy Anniversary of your 60^th birthday”? I think not. Happy birthday, Phillip.

            Here is a request to the thousands of people who phone here when I’m away and leave completely unintelligible messages: slow down and speak clearly. Last evening I arrived home to find the phone flashing a signal. The message was: “This is xmxmmmmsd talking from Plindter Rooof. Can you be at drwlqq at cttr o’clock tomorrow morning? Call me back and let me know would you? 2dd-9sx9.”

            Yeah, I’ll be there for sure, but first I have to stakfffjw.

                                    **************************

            Flug’s nephew Andre LeBlanc from just outside Nitchequon, Quebec, was visiting his old uncle last week and got to talking about the days when he was an active member of the FLQ (Front de Liberation de Quebec). “I used to laugh at the English guys at the weather station where I worked, when they would try to do nice things for us separatists. I called it French-mending,” he said, and added that one guy named Henderson actually had a hand in organizing the Quebec government’s hated (by the Anglophones) Bill 101 that has provided a lot of entertainment over the years.

            Flug has gone fishing about 2,000 times in his life and always followed the letter of the law. During all that time he never saw a forest ranger – or any other kind of ranger, lone or otherwise – while he was fishing. This year he thought September 16 was September 15 and went looking for the elusive and savage brook trout. Guess what? He’ll get out sometime in November, about the same time as an axe murderer who has served more than three months of his 20-year sentence. Flug asked the judge for “one a them  concurrent sentences” but that was a no-fly zone.

            Speaking of fishing, one day in July I was fishing with the Perfessor when he stepped behind a tree to perform #1. When he came out the whole front of his pants was  wet. “It’s not what it looks like,” he said sheepishly. I still haven’t found out what it was if it wasn’t what it looked like.

            From my list of strange expressions we use: “I am going to fill the car with gas.” If we think about that at all, we can only hope and pray that we are not about to fill the CAR with gas. Although I remember the time that Willie Dredge, who used to pump gas for Rusty Matheson in Andover, lost his focus when filling the judge’s Lincoln and poured a few gallons onto and into the back seat where the judge had a quarter of a deer he had just shot in Carlingford.

            Many people in the U.S. and Canada, especially in Victoria and southern Madawaska Counties in New Brunswick, hope Trump doesn’t get elected president of the great republic. If he does, Russia’s Putin will likely nuke all U.S. Air Force bases first thing. I hope he has his books up to date about Loring AFB, near Caribou, Maine. It closed in the 1990s.

                                               -end-